This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Yesterday gamers booting up their PS3 or PS4 were frustrated to find that the PlayStation Network was down for maintenance. But this wasn’t scheduled downtime, it was the work of hackers targeting Sony’s service.

Sony has since confirmed that PSN was taken offline by a denial-of-service attack, which overwhelmed the network with artificially high levels of traffic. They also confirmed no data had been accessed, the hackers, known as the Lizard Squad, simply disrupted normal service. However, that’s not all they did yesterday.

While the PSN DoS attack was underway, the same group of hackers also discovered Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley was flying from Dallas to San Diego with American Airlines. They then proceeded to issue a bomb threat warning for the flight and tweeted the following message to American Airlines regarding explosives:

That resulted in Flight 362 being diverted to Phoenix, causing a major inconvenience for the 179 passengers on board including Smedley. Understandably an FBI investigation is under way. They take all bomb threats seriously, and fake threats just as seriously. An image has also appeared for an e-ticket for the flight, raising the question as to how they knew Smedley was on Flight 362 and who actually purchased this particular ticket.

Taking down PSN is serious enough and will kick off an investigation by authorities, but adding bomb threats and forcing a flight to be diverted into the mix will certainly make this a high priority for the FBI. The hackers are clearly either naive or very confident about the wall of anonymity they are sitting behind.